Sunday, March 12, 2017

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. It’s
partly that the Peabody is engaged in a large-scale planning exercise that,
when implemented, will change the face of the Museum as radically as at any
time in it’s 150 years of existence. It is all about, as one colleagues said,
reimagining the natural history museum for the 21st Century. At the
same time as this, I’ve been working with Cliff Duke (Ecological Society of
America) and Elizabeth Merritt (AAM) on a project looking at models for long-term sustainability of
natural history collections. A lot of this involves diversifying the revenue
streams that support collections and repurposing some of our activities,
critical when you consider the current political climate in the US and
worldwide.

So one way or another, change is in the air and on my mind.
At one level, you might question why we need to change
all. It’s been almost 500 years and natural history museums are still around,
when many other apparently successful things (automats, video rental stores,
and pay phones, to give just a few examples) are not. So we must be doing
something right. In part, it’s that we have no real competition for what we do.
There are many other organizations that provide entertainment, education, and
research support, but none of these are backed by collections. As I like to
tell our students, the only reason we know anything about the past of our
planet is because of our collections. Until someone invents a TARDIS, they are
the only way that we have to travel back in time. We do time travel. How
awesome is that?

This should support the argument that our collections are critically important to us. Without them, we are vulnerable to competitors that do
things faster, smarter, noisier, and – critically – cheaper. This makes me feel
better when I bang on about increasing the exposure of collections – and I mean
“collections,” the whole mass of them, not the cherry-picked greatest hits that
make up the contents of most museum galleries – to the public. You have to
understand not just why we have these things, but why we need so many of them and
how having this mass of material affects everyone's lives.

But... we are also in the business of information
delivery. The processes by which people access and share information, and the
systems and technology that underpin them, have changed faster and more
radically in the last 20 years than at any time in our history. And we’ve
embraced this. In one of the largest shifts of focus ever seen in our
community, through funding initiatives, and training programs, workshops and
conferences, we’ve reimagined ourselves as digital data providers.

We’re not by any means there yet, but what’s going on in
natural history collections is, in many ways, as exciting as some of the big
mission pivots that you see in industries like IBM (hardware manufacture to
tech consultancy and IT services), GE (finance and consumer products to “the
internet of really big things”), and Netflix (DVD rental to streaming digital
media and content production). Exciting, but also a bit frightening. We are, as
a matter of philosophy, making our digital content freely available to whoever
wants to use it, and there are many organizations that are more than capable of
repackaging and providing it, potentially with added value. So we can’t simply be data providers. We need added value of our own.

Which brings us back to the power of real items. The
information extracted from our specimens is use-dependent. The more you use
them, especially utilizing new techniques to answer questions that you couldn’t
previously address, the more information is yielded. Without this link to the
specimens, the information packaged by anyone, whether it’s us or a third-party
provider, would rapidly stagnate and lose value.

That means that use, which was always important, now becomes critical, and has to be factored into our
preservation practices. Put another way, preservation does not necessarily add
to the value of the object. Modern methods of quantitative risk assessment
assume that damage to a specimen usually involves some loss in value. But
clearly there are some cases where that loss of value is offset by additional
value generated by use. We already accept this by allowing consumptive or
destructive sampling of specimens. When I was starting out with collections, I
used to say, "I want these objects to be around for someone to use 500
years from now." Now I’m more inclined to the view that in 500 years’
time, I would like those objects to have generated enough additional value to
justify the cost of preserving them for 500 years.

Value generated from the use of the collections also factors back into the sort of
conversations that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Maybe if we’re
“reimagining the natural history museum for the 21st century,” we
need to put the use of the collections, which are our unique proposition, front-and-center.
You could argue that in our desire to preserve our collections for certain,
narrow categories of use, we’ve shied away from exposing them to wider
audiences, building physical and operational barriers that keep people and
collections apart. This is a myopic approach, which boxes us in and potentially closes the door on novel forms of usage.

To my way of thinking, a big planning project is an opportunity to redraw those boundaries,
and bring people and collections into closer contact. It's also an opportunity to ask some fairly fundamental questions about who we are, and what we want to be. All too often, our answer to the latter is to be better at the former.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Once upon a time, there was a knight, bold and brave, who
rode the lands, accompanied by his faithful squire, looking for monsters to
slay. In truth, the knight had only ever slain one monster, many years before.
But he was firm in his belief that, given the right set of circumstances, he
could be the mightiest monster slayer of all time, and that if he was, people
would truly understand just how valuable he was to the kingdom and its
monster-plagued inhabitants. Asit was,
the knight and his squire never quite had enough money to live off. This
irritated the knight greatly, not only because he was hungry, but because he
could not understand why the people did not appreciate how important he was.

To convince the populace of his skill and prowess, the
knight sang songs of his past victory. They were songs of surpassing complexity
and eloquence and people loved to hear them. He particularly liked to sing his
songs outside the walls of the City, because he was convinced that within those
walls lay a treasure – a pot of gold whose contents could never be exhausted.
The knight was certain that, one day, he would write a song so perfect that the
burghers of the City would have no option but to give him access to the
bottomless pot.

So each year, the knight sang a new song, and each year the
burghers nodded politely and told him, as clearly as possible and in worlds of one
syllable, that there was no bottomless pot of gold. Sometimes they even threw
him small bags of gold from the walls of the city, to make him go away. But the
knight would just chuckle knowingly, wink, tap his nose, and ride away to
compose a new song. “Mark, my words, laddie,” he would say to his squire, as
they shivered away the night under some hedgerow, trying to say warm and dry.
“When I find the right words for my song, that treasure shall be mine.”

“Don’t you mean, ‘ours’?” the squire would ask, and the
knight would look shifty and tell him to get on with feeding the horse.

Within the walls, the burghers were toiling away developing
inventions to deal with their monster problems. One year, they built a
steam-powered tank that could kill dragons. In an effort to make the knight go
away, they told him about this. The knight did look a little worried for a
while, but he came back the next day with a whole new song, written overnight,
about how a bold knight used his unparalleled knowledge of the ways of monsters
to lead the tank to the places where the dragons were most likely to be found.

“But our tank travels much more quickly than your horse,”
the burghers protested. “How will you keep up?”

The knight looked especially crafty. “If you give me the
bottomless pot of gold, I shall build a motorcycle.”

That year, the knight got no gold at all.

As time went by, the knight’s horse got thinner and more
bony, and his armor began to rust. But he remained confident that the
bottomless pot of gold was just around the corner. Meanwhile his squire, who
was getting tired of being hungry, and who badly wanted another squire to help
him with his duties (there being far more repairs to the knight’s failing armor
than before), took to visiting the local farms and villages, looking for ideas
about what they might trade for food.

In one village, he found the people getting ready for their
May festival. “We’re in a bind, you know” the village elder said sadly. “We cut
down all the trees hereabouts, and now we don’t have any maypole.” The squire
thought of the knight’s tall lance.

At a farm down the road, he spoke with a plowman who was sat
disconsolately by his bent plowshare. “The ground on this farm is as hard as
iron,” the plowman said. “What I wouldn’t give for a blade of hard steel to
break through it.” The squire thought of the knight’s mighty axe, which had a
ready supply of spare blades.

At harvest time, he came upon a farmer whose scythe had
broken. “These crops will spoil if I can’t harvest them,” the farmer wailed.
“If only I had a sharp blade to chop them down.” The squire thought of the
knight’s great broadsword, which had not been drawn from its sheath in many
years.

At each place he visited, the squire asked about their
monster-killing needs. He had listened to the knight’s songs for so long that
he had become quite adept at singing them himself. He was a good singer, but
while the people appreciated what he sang, they had no gold for songs, or for
slaying monsters. “What good does it do me to slay dragons,” the farmer said,
“if my family starves for want of harvested crops?” “Ogres live far away,” the
plowman said, “but if I cannot plow this field, there will be no food for my
village.” “But what if the ogres come here?” the squire asked. “The city folk
will kill them with that tank they built,” the plowman said, confidently.

The squire went back to the knight and told him what he had
learnt. “True, they have no bottomless pot of gold,” the squire said. “But they
each have gold enough that our horse will be fed, as will we, and perhaps we
can buy that new helmet you were looking at the other day.” The knight looked
at the squire pityingly. “My equipment is for monster-slaying,” he said,
speaking slowly, so the squire would understand. “It is not for use in rural
pastimes. Besides, such rustic activities are a distraction from our main
business of slaying all of the monsters in the kingdom, for which only the
bottomless pot of gold will be sufficient. You are a smart fellow, in your own
way, but you know nothing of the complexities of funding a monster-slaying
program, which is the business of knights. Now go and fix my vambraces.”

So the knight continued his annual pilgrimages to the city,
sang his songs, and received the occasional, but never quite sufficient bag of
gold from the burghers. As time went by, his horse died, his armor fell apart,
and his tall lance developed an unfortunate kink. Eventually the squire, fed up
with being hungry all the time, parted company with the knight. He set up in business
making axe blade plowshares and converting swords into scythes. In time, he
made enough money to buy a horse and armor of his own, and while he never did
get to slay any dragons, he did so much good for the peasantry that they made
him their king. And he lived happily ever after.

Happy Holidays, everyone. This blog will return,
rejuvenated, in the New Year.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

This is one of my periodic mea culpas for a lack of posts. In this case, I have an excuse and I think it's a worthy one. I'm one of a group of people editing a new book on collection storage, due for publication late this year. Or early next year. It's a 650 page monster with 35 chapters and 60 authors and while I've never given birth, I suspect producing this thing will give me some sense of what that's like. When it comes out, buy it. We managed to assemble a fantastic group of authors and the results prove this. It's awesome.As part of the promotional activities for the book, we're holding a couple of sessions on collection storage at this year's AAM and AIC conferences, which is another excuse for me not getting any blogging done. This week, I'm in the process of pulling together the outline for a talk on institutional partnerships, which draws on discussions that we've been having among our authors and editors about the need for community outreach within museums, as much as beyond their walls.

As the people tasked with care of the collections, we often
assume that the world revolves around us; that conservation priorities are
dictated solely by the needs of the objects, as interpreted by us. In fact, we’re part of a wider institutional community that,
while it may embrace the general concept of collection care, has very a diverse
set of immediate needs that have to be met if the institution is to function
effectively. A strategy for collection storage, or indeed for
any aspect of collections care, that fails to take this into account is likely
to fail.

If you want more than that, you'll have to turn up for one of the sessions, either at AIC (Sunday, May 15 @ noon) or AAM (Thursday, May 27 @ 8:45am). There's a lot more than just me, you'll be relieved to hear; we have some truly awesome speakers, including Sanchita Balanchandran (AIC), Kelly McHugh (AIC), John Simmons (AAM), and Rob Waller (AIC & AAM). And there are interactive activities too!

Anyway, all of this talk of community, and the need for cooperation, and the value of consensus in decision making, has been resonating with me this morning. In the last couple of years, my own institution has been doing a lot of consensus-based decision making. You can read a pretty good article on it here. And you can read about one outcome of the consensus-based process here.

So today, I find myself in a pretty odd position. In a few weeks' time, I'm going to get up in front of a group of very passionate collections professionals and argue that, to do their job effectively, they need to embrace the reality that the world is not centered on them and their needs; that they need to take a wider perspective and engage in discussion with people whose goals may differ from theirs, in order to reach a consensus based on wider institutional needs. So if I truly believe in the value of consensus and communication, why am I so irritated?

I guess the answer is that there are some issues that are so toxic and so pervasive that no amount of "tough conversation" can substitute for clear, quick and decisive action. On a day-to-day basis, communication, cooperation, and conversation are invaluable tools for getting our work done. But sometimes, you just have to say "fuck consensus," and do what's right.

Friday, February 12, 2016

A long time ago, in a museum far, far, away, I was giving an
orientation tour of the collections for a newly appointed senior administrator.
The head of human resources accompanied us, and at one point he interrupted my
spiel to give her his take on our science program. “They’re our rock stars,” he
said, referring to the museum’s curators. “It’s our job to support them.”

To be honest, some of those curators thought they actually were
rock stars. They certainly tried to behave like one. There were times when this
was quite fun. There were times when it was not fun at all. Bad behavior can be
very entertaining, provided that you are not the victim of it.

That comment came back to me quite forcefully this week, as
I read the articles in Science and the Washington Post describing allegations
of sexual harassment at a major natural history museum.This is not the time or place to delve into
the specifics of that incident. But there are things that need to be said, more
generally, about what this tells us about how some museums are run.

I thought long and hard before starting this post. At some
level, I didn’t want to lay as much as a finger on such a messy subject.
But if this blog is about anything (other than fossils, dumb cryptozoologists,
and the vagaries of Federal funding) it’s about responsibility in the way we
look after collections. And that responsibility extends to the way we treat the
people that care for the collections.

In museums with tenured academic staff, be they university
or freestanding, there are two categories of people. There are curators, and
there is everyone else. As the man said, these curators are the rock stars. They are defined by metrics of achievement: publications, research funding, awards, and publicity.
They come up through a grueling and intensely competitive career process that
favors the alpha dog. The prize at the end is tenure. Once tenured, they cannot
be dismissed from their position without just cause. In practice, they are unlikely
to be dismissed at all.

Then, there’s everyone else. As that distant administrator
once said, and as many tenured curators firmly believe, our job is to support
the rock stars. Unless protected by a union contract, we’re employed at-will,
which means the museum does not have to establish just cause for firing us, or even
warn us in advance that we are at risk of being fired. In principle, I could be
fired for writing this blog post; in some institutions, I actually might be, a risk that was pointed out to me by my previous employer.

It
doesn’t take a genius to see that a two-tier structure like this is ripe for
abuse. If you set up a system where you create a high profile class of people,
who are outstanding talents in their field; set them apart from all other staff
in the institution; send out the message that they are critical to the
wellbeing of your organization; place them in positions of authority; and then
make them more-or-less immune from any consequences of their bad behavior,
you've created a potentially toxic situation in which bullying and harassment
are not only possible, but are almost inevitable.

Many people who have worked in a museum in this country, including some of you reading this blog, will
have either witnessed or experienced this. It might involve being summarily
overruled on a question of professional practice. It might mean being yelled at
in public, or sent bullying emails. It could be having to listen to
inappropriate, dismissive, or offensive comments about yourself or others. In some cases, it
could even mean assault or sexual harassment.

Museums are not the only places where this can happen. It can
occur if you work in a bank, or a car dealership, or a supermarket, or pretty much
anywhere. But that doesn’t make it OK, and it doesn't mean that we should shrug our shoulders and say it's just the way of the world. We should be
better than that. And we certainly shouldn’t tolerate it because, as
institutions, we value the contributions of the perpetrator more than those of the
victim.

Towards the end of last year, Yale was embroiled in a firestorm over free speech that spilled out into the national press. One of the
things that struck me forcefully was the response of some of my friends on the faculty, who
were deeply upset that their students, boiling over with anger at longstanding issues of race and inequality, were shouting down other faculty members. A couple of things emerged in conversation.

First, there was a strong sense of closing ranks. There's a genuine, but largely unspoken tradition of faculty solidarity within universities, that was clearly on display. At some gut level, my colleagues seem less bothered about exploring the underlying injustices that sparked the protests, and more concerned with the infringement of the faculty's right to be listened to with respect. It was couched in terms of the need to protect free speech, for sure, but it was also more than a little tribal. Second, I couldn’t
help but get the sense that they were upset because, in their minds, they
were the Good Guys. Why are these kids beating on us?

If you're a faculty member reading this, I'm afraid I have some bad news; in the cases of harassment and bullying I’m discussing here, you are not the
Good Guys, and however much you may feel oppressed by your administration, crushed by your tenure process, ground
down by your teaching load, and underappreciated by your students, you are not
the victims. You are a very entitled minority and you are a big part of the
problem, either because you act badly yourself, or because you tolerate others’ bad
behavior in the name of collegiality, faculty solidarity, or a reluctance to let central administration mess with the way your govern your affairs. But you can also, if you choose, be part of the
solution.

The system of academic tenure was created to defend your
academic freedoms; to be able to work, teach, publish, and speak out on
whatever subjects you want without fear of censure; rights that all of us, myself included, would defend passionately. It was not intended to give
you a free pass to behave like an asshole to your colleagues, staff, and
students. Not only do you have a responsibility to the people that work for
you, but you also have a responsibility as a mentor to the next generation of
curators and academics; your grad students and postdocs who are watching how
you behave towards your staff and colleagues, and who are modeling their behavior on you.

The way forward is to have faculty, be they curators or anyone else, make a clear, unified, and unambiguous statement that the
protection provided by tenure applies solely to academic freedoms and that
anything else, be it bullying, sexual harassment, or any other form of
inappropriate behavior, will be subject to exactly the same disciplinary processes, the same sanctions, that apply to
your non-faculty colleagues. That they will not turn a blind eye to bad behavior in the name of faculty solidarity. or to preserve their independence. And that they will go to their administrations and
charge them with implementing those principles. Because ultimately, unless some people get fired for their actions, nothing is going to change.

I firmly believe that, one way or another, these changes are going to come. And
it’s far better for our community if our tenured colleagues are seen to lead them.

Monday, June 15, 2015

I had intended to break my (relatively) long silence with a
piece on the pitfalls of confusing research infrastructure with big science.
But instead, I’ve ended up writing about Jurassic
World. Go figure.

I’ll put my cards on the table straight away; I didn’t have
high hopes for this movie and my instincts were right. Despite the relentless
noise, roaring, shouting, running, etc., I actually dozed off about halfway
through. Colin Trevorrow may be a highly competent director, but he’s no Steven
Spielberg.

Which is a pity, because there was at least the kernel of a
good film here. The idea of a world where genetically de-extincted dinosaurs
are so commonplace that you have to engineer fake ones to meet the public’s
demand for new thrills is an interesting one, and also quite meta given that
this is exactly what the Jurassic Park
movie franchise felt it had to do to drum up an audience. The massive figures for the opening weekend suggest that it’s a winning formula.

Look beyond this, and there are some more worrying things
that emerge. Others have written more eloquently than I can about the clumsy misogyny represented by the portrayal of the main female character as a career
driven ice-queen who can’t relate to kids and needs to be humanized by exposure
to a real man. Knowing my daughter and her friends were watching made me feel a
bit queasy about the message being conveyed; yeah, a woman can have an
important job, but real fulfillment will only come when she gets herself a man
and a family.

Clare Dearing is certainly no Ellie Sattler, but then
there’s no Ellie Sattler in Jurassic
World against which to measure her, and precious few scientists of any
description. In the previous Jurassic
Park movies, the scientists were the heroes. In this one, we have an ex-military
dog-whisperer, which says a lot about where we’ve gone since the last JP movie came out, in July of 2001. Yes, we still boo the military-industrial
complex – represented by Vincent D’Onofrio’s character – but now we want our
leading men to come with the approved stamp of heroism that only Serving Your
Country can bring.

Owen Grady may talk a lot about Alphas and pack structure,
but this is animal behavior reduced to the level of understanding of the guy
that teaches obedience classes for your dog. In Jurassic World, “science” is represented by the geneticist, Henry
Wu; a character far more reptilian than the things he cooks up in his lab. Wu
is not so much villainous as completely lacking a conscience; in one of the
better moments of the film, he is asked why he has created the monstrous
creature that is running amok in the park. “Because that’s what you wanted,” he
says, or words to that effect. More teeth. Cooler. The fact that it is also
lethally dangerous is not Wu’s problem.

And that, in a nutshell, is the message of Jurassic World. Science generates a
genetically modified organism and releases it into the world with no concern
for the troubles it may cause; deciding whether such a thing is right or wrong
is not what scientists do. It’s left to an ordinary guy who understands, in a
vague, gut-driven sense, that animals are sentient beings and not “assets” (to
use the Park’s terminology) to save the day for humanity. This is a far cry
from the original Michael Crichton novel, which argued that only scientific
theory can critique and predict the perils and pitfalls of turning reconstructed
dinosaurs into tourist attractions.

My colleagues in museums around the country are
looking forward to cashing in on a new wave of dinosaur popularity, and for
this I guess we have to show some gratitude to Jurassic World. But the overwhelming message that the movie leaves
you with is that science is a dangerously amoral pursuit that is no substitute
for a good old boy on a motorcycle who can relate to “raptors.” Given thelevels of public skepticism about the motives of scientists, I’m not sure this
is something we should be embracing.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

On April 3rd, the Chicago Tribune breathlessly reported the creation of a new group whose aim is improved management of natural history collections. In the words of the group's convener, Field Museum president Richard Lariviere, these six North American and six European museums are working to create"a unified global collection," with "a digital backbone, a digital record, and shared responsibility for filling gaps."

According to the Tribune, Lariviere - along with Kirk Johnson of the National Museum of Natural History - invited his peers to meet in Chicago after learning there was no such gathering of the institutions with major biological collections. Apparently the group even has a name,"Natural History Museum Leaders Group, chosen, [Lariviere] said, because that's what his assistant had been calling the group in setting up the first meeting."

After giving you a moment or two to mull over quite how perfect that last quote is, and to consider whether this institution has anything to teach the world about how to create better managed collections, let's take a step back and ask the wider question that this article (indirectly) raises - what are big museums good for?

The twelve that make up the Natural History Museum Leaders Group (I guess we'll have to call it the NHMLG for now) are, unarguably, some of the largest of their type in the world. Big museums like this do a lot of good. In addition to the wealth of their collections, they are also generously endowed, can attract high quality staff, and because of their high visitor numbers they offer matchless opportunities for public education and outreach. So when big museums talk, people listen.

And this, of course, is also the problem with big museums. They are attention and resource hogs. There are many great museums in the United Kingdom, but you'd be hard-pressed to realize this in the face of the remorseless flood of slick publicity that emerges from South Kensington. Not for nothing did people bridle when the British Museum (Natural History) changed its name to The Natural History Museum. A large, high profile institution of this sort can act like a financial black hole within its national museum community, sucking in funding from donors, foundations, and government agencies, and leaving smaller institutions fighting over the scraps.

The U.S., by and large, has avoided this problem. Yes, there are massive institutions like the Smithsonian, AMNH, and Field Museum. But there are also a whole raft of small, medium, and large collections below this. Their absence from the membership of the NHMLG may be justified on the basis of size, but it's still a glaring omission.

It's also unfortunate because - again, by and large - big stand-alone institutions tend not to be great innovators. I mean this as no disrespect to my many talented friends and colleagues in these museums, but there are good reasons why this is the case. When I think about who is making the running in, for example, collections digitization, it's places like Florida, Kansas, Berkeley, Colorado, the Illinois Natural History Survey, Yale, and Tulane, to name just a few. They tend to be medium-sized museums, often associated with universities, and featuring a mix of tenured academics and professional staff.

These museums are rooted in a culture where risk-taking and innovation is valued; where there is easy on-site access to expertise in other disciplines (computing, imaging, material science, etc); where collections are not so large that the task of operations and maintenance eats 100% of staff time; and where the collection staff is not so big that they can afford to develop all-consuming disciplinary specializations.

We also tend to collaborate a lot. Of the last five grant proposals I submitted, four were multi-institutional projects. Participation in these projects, in the national digitization activities of iDigBio, and in professional societies like SPNHC and NSCA, weaves together collaborative networks that are, I would argue, a lot more effective and sustainable than a top-down initiative like NHMLG.

And there are many organizations in the natural history collections community, tackling biocollections digitization (iDigBio, B-CON/NIBA), improving collections care (NatSCA, SPNHC), fostering international cooperation (SCICOLL, ICOM-Nathist), setting standards for data and data delivery (TDWG, GBIF), addressing the needs of small collections (SCNET), and lobbying for increased collection funding (NSCA); most of these are linked by shared membership and both formal and informal collaborations. There are organizations for museum directors (ASMD), registrars (ARCS), and conservators (AIC) and there are informal communities devoted to natural history collections connected by social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook. It's true that there is no organization specifically for heads of very large natural history museums, but that might be because the museum community does't really need one.

If big museums choose to participate in existing efforts, they can have a truly empowering effect. If they develop their own, competing programs then they run the risk of distracting attention and diverting resources away from established efforts. Rather than reinventing the wheel, big museums should be encouraging their staff to participate in these programs (as many already are) and taking onboard the lessons learned.

Initially I thought I was going to finish there, but on reflection there is one last thing that needs saying. In this day and age, creating an organization of major museums whose membership is limited to institutions from North America and Europe sends the worst possible message. Where are the Chinese? Where are the Brazilians? Are there no major museums in Africa whose leaders are worth listening too? It's not much of a "unified global collection" and for all of its talk of digital backbones and digital records, NHMLG looks more nineteenth than twenty first century.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

In the New York Times this morning, John Schwartz reports that a group of prominent scientists are calling for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers. He also quotes my opinion as to why this might be a bad thing, and very nicely refers to me as a "prominent" blogger. Since I've been a little quiet of late (grant proposals, editing a book, blah, blah, blah - all the usual excuses) I figured this might be a good time to provide a little background as to why I find myself in the unlikely position of defending David Koch.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. There's an overwhelming weight of evidence that supports the theory that global warming is real and that human activities are contributing significantly to this. This position is supported by the vast majority of the scientific community, and I agree with it too.

Obviously there are many people in politics and industry that don't agree with this. Because the weight of evidence is so conclusive, one of the few routes they have available to them is to challenge the integrity of the scientific process. This is what some people in Congress are trying to do at the moment, by critiquing the process of peer review.

Climate change deniers (for want of a better term) like to argue that the scientific community is not neutral - that it is an advocate for the theory of anthropogenic climate change and that scientists have slanted the peer review process to ensure that anyone who supports a different model for climate cannot get funded or published.

For anyone that knows scientists, or works in science, the idea that they could actually create and maintain a conspiracy of this sort is laughable - it's hard to find a more fractious, less-organized group of people. Nonetheless, the idea of a conspiracy has a lot of traction in the mind of the public.

Museums have many different roles in science - as research institutions in their own right; as sources of data for other people's research; and as vehicles for bringing science to the public. Museums play an important role in explaining the science of climate change and the implications of what we're discovering for people's life and well-being.

All of the survey data that we have seems to show that the public really values museums as authoritative and accurate sources of information (see here for an example). They trust us in a way that they don't trust "scientists," even though many of us are scientists and our collections are one of the many resources used to model the effects of climate change.

If we shift our position from education to outright advocacy, then we risk damaging that trust. There is a world of difference between educating people about the effects of climate change versus telling them not to buy products from company X because it's causing climate change. Once we start doing that, we lay ourselves open to the charge that we are no better than the climate change deniers - that we are just pushing our own agenda.

The mission statement of the Yale Peabody Museum is:

"to serve Yale University by advancing our understanding of earth’s history through geological, biological, and anthropological research, and by communicating the results of this research to the widest possible audience through publication, exhibition, and educational programs."

And, just for kicks n' grins, the mission statement of the AMNH is:

"To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."

These are pretty typical mission statements for a natural history museum and you'll note that neither says anything about fighting to defend the natural world or campaigning against the fossil fuel industry. There are other organizations that do have that in their missions, but by and large museums do not.

Museums need money to perform their mission of research and education, and for that they need donors and investments.
Board members are responsible for helping museums realize that mission, through advice on finance and investments, by soliciting support from donors, and by providing support themselves. If you, as a board member, were to do something that interfered with the museum's pursuit of that mission - such as actively lobbying for reductions in funding for science education, or for research in museums - then that would be a problem that would likely result in your being asked to leave the Board. So if anything, being a board member might actually tie your hands.

Ah, but what about "covert" influence, as Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and signer of the letter calls it? Well, that can cut both ways. Consider a point made later in the NYT article. Referencing a 2010 New Yorker piece, it says:

"an underlying message of exhibits in the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is that humans 'evolved in response to a changing world.' The article said that such language suggests that climate change has been a feature of the planet since prehistoric times, which plays down human contributions to climate change."

Outrageous. Except that climate change has been a feature of the planet for the last 4 billion- plus years, life on Earth has evolved (and continues to evolve) in response to the changing climate, and we use those historical data to model the impacts of the current, anthropogenic changes. Tricky, right? So perhaps the signatories of the letter think museums should be modifying their message to de-emphasize past climate change? You see where that might lead...

Faced with similar pressure from campaigners to disinvest from the fossil fuel industry, the President of Harvard, Drew Faust, provided a very clear statement of why Harvard was disinclined to do so. In essence, it boiled down to one main point:

"We should.... be very wary of steps intended to instrumentalize our endowment in ways that would appear to position the University as a political actor rather than an academic institution. Conceiving of the endowment not as an economic resource, but as a tool to inject the University into the political process or as a lever to exert economic pressure for social purposes, can entail serious risks to the independence of the academic enterprise. The endowment is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change."

From her lips to my blog. Museums are not responsible for campaigning to protect the natural world; they are responsible for generating and supporting the science that underpins those efforts and for educating the public about both the science and what it means for them, their communities, and the planet. When they shift into the role of advocacy - disinvesting from this industry, turning down that donation, or removing those board members - they risk damaging their ability to fulfill that mission and enabling others to argue that the information they provide is partisan and not to be trusted.

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Rudyard Kipling said that power without responsibility is the prerogative of harlots. Some cynics say that it is also the prerogative of the tenured museum curator. Am I am one of those cynics? Read the blog and decide for yourself.